Dear Weekend Jolter,
Nope, they didn't hear from Hill 24 (it's a pretty good movie, pray TCM shows it again someday), nor did we hear from Kamala Harris when asked directly by Vice President Mike Pence (debate moderator Susan Page couldn't trouble herself to perform the important task) if she and ticket-mate Joe Biden would say yes or no to court packing. Harris took the opportunity to write a new chapter in history: Contriving a Lincolnian imprimatur for the Democrats' opposition to Amy Coney Barrett, she time-traveled to 1864, when Honest Abe, we're told, delayed a SCOTUS nomination to allow for a presidential election.
Too bad it didn't happen that way. Moderator Page (lacking any Candy Crowley gumption) did not tell the California Senator, "Umm, that's baloney. And your pants are on fire too."
Dan McLaughlin — who has emerged as the guru of SCOTUS-Election-Year-nomination history — did see the flames. As he recounts with impeccable authority, the facts from 1864 were quite different from Harris' . . . fiction (our headline writer dubbed it dishonesty). Here's Dan's post from The Corner:
It was impossible to miss how Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden, refused to answer questions about their plans to expand the Supreme Court. But she also misrepresented history.
Harris claimed at the VP debate that Abraham Lincoln refused to nominate a candidate for Chief Justice in October 1864 because "Honest Abe said, it's not the right thing to do" and wanted the people to vote first.
Lincoln, of course, said no such thing. He sent no nominee to the Senate in October 1864 because the Senate was out of session until December. He sent a nominee the day after the session began, and Salmon P. Chase was confirmed the same day. And Lincoln wanted to dangle the nomination before Chase and several other potential candidates because he wanted them to campaign for him. Lincoln's priority was winning the election, which was necessary to win the war — and he filled the vacancy at the first possible instant.
Kamala Harris is simply inventing history.
Sorry to mansplain, Senator.
So, why is mum the word when it comes to Biden-Harris admitting to their desire to see SCOTUS packed? Because, as Andy McCarthy analyzes, that media, which postures itself as the guardian of our Republic, won't call them on it. It's all quite purposeful. From Andy's piece:
Why do they do this? Because they are sympathetic to the radical Left. They believe, with good reason, that they need the energy of the radical Left to get elected. They understand that balancing act: They will have to accommodate the radical Left to some degree once in office . . . and if they do that a hair too much, their time in office will be short.
But mainly they remain mum because they know they can get away with it. They know the media, which would hound a Republican non-stop over the most mundane political dodges, or even hound them over ground already trod again and again — Have you condemned white supremacy in the last ten minutes? Yes or No! — will not challenge them in a serious way.
For two straight 90-minute debates, it's been comical to watch Vice President Biden and Senator Harris not answer the court-packing question. Biden did it peremptorily, on the patently ludicrous rationale that, if he answered the question, it would become an issue. (Note how confident he is that, if he doesn't answer the question, the media will prevent it from becoming an issue.) Harris tried the smooth-talk approach — Okay, let's talk court-packing . . . and then blather on about courts but not about packing them — but she is no Obama, so it came off as amateur hour.
Note, however, that Biden and Harris have employed what should be futile stratagems with a decent amount of success: It's been three weeks now, and they still haven't had to answer. Why? Because only Republicans and conservatives are pressing the question. Mainstream journalists have not pushed the issue at the debates or on the campaign trail.
Do read the whole thing. If you can't, because you're not an NRPLUS member, well, isn't it high time you became one? The answer is — yes. Fix that here. Now, let us avail ourselves of the bounty that awaits below in this Columbus Day Weekend Jolt.
Editorials
We argue the American people deserved transparency from the White House about President Trump's COVID condition. From the editorial:
At this sensitive moment, it is of the utmost importance that the White House convey accurate information about the president's condition. People tend to doubt official assurances about a sick leader's health status in the best of circumstances, and the White House had limited credibility to begin with. It is now clear that the initial talk of the president having "mild" symptoms was misleading, and the White House physician Sean Conley compounded the offense in his press briefing Saturday at Walter Reed hospital by dancing around to avoid disclosing that the president had received supplemental oxygen. On Sunday, he admitted that he was trying, as he put it, to give an upbeat assessment to match the president's positive attitude.
This won't do. The guy in the white lab coat should simply give the public the facts about the president's condition and treatment and leave the spin to the usual suspects. Meanwhile, the president needs to make it clear that he wants his doctors to be transparent, and waive HIPAA and other doctor-patient protections so they can do so.
Trump's positive test, and those of the First Lady and a number of close aides, immediately raised questions about White House protocols around the virus. There is no doubt that the president has had a cavalier and disdainful attitude toward masks. He mocked Joe Biden for wearing one so often at last Tuesday's debates.
Masks may be annoying, even more so because some promote them with such religious zeal, but wearing them, especially when indoors or in close proximity to others, is a low-cost way to at least diminish the spread of the virus. The White House believed that it could dispense with masks because it has a regime of daily testing. We now know the virus can slip through even frequently administered tests (and it turns out the tests used by the White House were prone to false negatives).
A Slew and Smattering of Sharp Stories and Savvy Studies for the Sanity-Seeking
1. Boy oh boy, Alexandra DeSanctis b*tch-slaps "mansplaining" debate commentary. From the Corner post:
Lots of progressives, especially left-wing feminists, suddenly have lots of thoughts to offer about the not-so-secret sexism that apparently motivates men every time they interrupt a woman. The fact that almost the entire media immediately fixated on this line of attack says a lot about how (badly) they thought Harris performed. It's also evidence of how facile and superficial woke identity politics is.
What could possibly be more condescending than to say to a successful female politician, "You won because the man you were debating interrupted you a few times, and it made me feel bad for you"?
Pence interrupted both Harris and the moderator a few times. He shouldn't have. Harris herself also interrupted Pence on more than one occasion, and she interrupted or spoke over the moderator. She shouldn't have. None of this was evidence of sexism. It was, after all, a debate, where there's generally a bit of back and forth and tension, and everyone expects the candidates to be contentious when attempting to make their point.
Mike Pence treated Harris exactly the way he would've treated a Democratic vice-presidential candidate who was a man, exactly the way he treated Tim Kaine in 2016. Harris's cheerleaders should have more respect for her than to use this foolish argument in her defense.
2. About Joe Biden's claimed record of defying dictators, David Harsanyi says — it's invisible. From the article:
It was Obama who capitulated to Russia's accession into the World Trade Organization. "President Obama has made Russia's W.T.O. membership a top priority for U.S.-Russia relations in 2011," an administration official explained at the time.
Biden led that effort, telling the Russians in 2009 that it was "time to hit the reset button" after eight years of U.S. antagonism (George W. Bush, who had once looked into Putin's steely eyes and perceived a "very straightforward and trustworthy" person, had reversed course.) Biden told Medvedev that accession to the WTO was "the most important item on our agenda." His tough talk included things such as: "For my entire career, when I sat with a Russian leader, I was sitting with one of the most powerful men in the world, and that's how we still think of you — I mean that sincerely." Considering the "reset" was based on the notion that Russia was no longer a superpower, I think maybe Biden wasn't being entirely sincere.
Obama's famous 2012 debate quip about how "the 1980s are now calling" to ask for Romney's foreign policy back didn't merely trigger some gentle mocking on Twitter. The entire Obama foreign-policy crew sought to make a detailed case for why appeasing Putin was important.
Every foreign-policy issue during the Obama years was predicated on a false choice: war and appeasement.
3. Jeanne Mancini highlights Kamala Harris's radical record on abortion. From the article:
So what can those who respect life expect from a Biden administration? The truth is found in the positions of his opportunistic running mate, Senator Harris. On Wednesday, she should be quizzed and made to take a clear stand on issues that Biden has dodged, including abortion and court-packing.
In September, Senator Harris bragged on a video call about "a Harris administration, together with Joe Biden as the president of the United States." Days later, at a campaign event, Biden also talked of a Harris/Biden administration. Clearly, Harris would have more power than a typical vice president, making it especially critical for the American people to know where she stands on important issues.
No matter how you slice it, electing Biden and Harris would mean four years in which the unborn are under relentless attack. Unlike Biden, who changed his position on abortion out of political expediency, Harris has used her positions to further the abortion industry and hurt the weak and vulnerable. As California's attorney general, she took an extremely aggressive approach to this issue, attacking pro-life pregnancy-care centers and citizen journalists looking to expose the barbarism of Planned Parenthood. This fealty to the abortion lobby continued after she was elected to the U.S. Senate, so much so that after she was named as Biden's running mate, Planned Parenthood spent six figures on an ad proclaiming her "our reproductive health champion for vice president."
4. Andrew McCarthy reports on once-upon-a-Commie and prominent hoaxer John Brennan's role in promoting the Russia collusion narrative. From the piece:
I argued in Ball of Collusion that the Trump-Russia probe was not just an FBI investigation. It was based on several strands of intelligence, much of it from foreign intelligence agencies, that came into the CIA. In the early stages, Brennan was the main driver; the FBI's role became more consequential in the latter stages (particularly when FISA warrants were sought).
By Brennan's own account, outlined in his congressional testimony and public statements, he played the role of a clearinghouse. That is, he took information from foreign services, put his own analytical spin on it, and packaged it for the FBI. As Brennan put it in House testimony:
I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion — cooperation occurred.
I further explained in the book that, among the vehicles by which Brennan funneled information to the bureau, was "an interagency task force, comprised on the domestic side by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Treasury Department, and on the foreign-intelligence side by the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligence Director James Clapper," with the Obama White House also kept in the loop. Brennan was the catalyst, and the main FBI player in this arrangement was Strzok.
5. Jimmy Quinn reports on how an "Asian NATO" — comprised of Japan, Indian, Australia, and the U.S. — should be giving Red China the willies. From the analysis:
Pompeo, unsurprisingly, was blunt during the talks in Tokyo. During a speech in which he assailed the Chinese regime's cover up of the coronavirus and its authoritarianism, he said, "As partners in this Quad, it is more critical now than ever that we collaborate to protect our people and partners from the CCP's exploitation, corruption, and coercion." But the secretary of state's counterparts declined to join him in explicitly naming the chief threat to the values that they share.
But while the others preferred to focus on their commitments to the freedom and inclusivity of the Indo-Pacific, that did not obscure the actions that their governments have taken of late to push back against CCP misconduct: India, which has seen a flare up in its Himalayan border dispute with China, recently banned dozens of Chinese apps that it claimed were vectors of influence for the Chinese party-state. Australia has in recent years rooted out foreign interference on its soil — and it provoked Beijing's ire when it called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. And Japan's Abe, of course, championed the very concept of the "free and open Indo-Pacific" before it became a staple of American policy planning documents.
Although these U.S. partners remain reluctant to make the Quad primarily and exclusively about combating Chinese influence, the four countries nonetheless seem poised to push forward on these talks with more regularity.
But if the Quad is unwilling to cement this partnership in a more institutionalized way, and if the group champions shared principles but not an explicitly anti-CCP message, what good can it actually do? Quite a bit, actually.
6. Because newspapers are so toadying to the Democrat Party, Isaac Schorr finds their candidate endorsing to be a pointless ritual. From the piece:
Part of the problem is that there was never any doubt as to which candidate would secure the Times and Post's support. The former has not endorsed a Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. The latter has never backed a GOP candidate for president. Their endorsement announcements come not as products of well-reasoned debate among an ideologically diverse group of thinkers, but as stagnant inevitabilities from an insular class of left-wing crusaders. Consequently, the endorsements are not dependent upon who the major party candidates are, what experience they bring to the table, or the policies they espouse. It's a ritual, not a choice.
And the quality of their editorials on these matters suffer as a result. Honest appraisals of the Republican and Democratic visions are nowhere to be found, replaced by vapid wish-casting and villainizing. The Times asserts that Biden will re-instill the American people with confidence in our institutions, but he won't even commit to opposing partisan court-packing efforts. He respects science, but supports on-demand abortion at any and every stage of development while demurring that there are "at least three" genders. He'll purportedly entrust powerful positions in his administration to competent, qualified people, but he invited Kamala Harris — who aspires to become, as my colleague Cameron Hilditch put it, "queen of the post-constitutional remnants" of America — to join him on the Democratic ticket and promises to put perennial candidate Beto "Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15" O' Rourke in charge of his administration's gun-confiscation efforts. They say he has an impressive record of accomplishment in the Senate, but the only accomplishment that merits a mention is the Violence Against Women Act — parts of which were thrown out as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And that's to say nothing of their aforementioned whitewashing of his abysmal foreign-policy record.
For its part, the Post parrots the Biden campaign's talking points by deeming him "deeply empathetic" and rewrites history by calling Harris — who has not yet spent four full years in the Senate — the most qualified pick possible. In fact, it was made quite clear by Biden's primary-season promise to pick a woman and Senator Amy Klobuchar's pleas to pick one of color that Biden valued not qualifications but rather the "right" identity when choosing a vice president.
7. Pat Toomey will not seek reelection to the Senate in 2022. Jim Geraghty pays tribute to a great conservative. From the Corner post:
It's hard to begrudge Toomey the decision to hang it up after two six-year terms. He turns 59 later this year. He's done a lot of what he wanted to do in his ten years in the Senate, and the longer-term prospects for shrinking the size and spending of the federal government don't look terrific, whether it's a second-term of Trump, President Biden, or President Harris at some point in the future.
Toomey chased Arlen Specter out of the GOP early in the 2010 cycle, won two extremely hard-fought Senate races in a state that is purple at best, and is probably about as fiscally conservative as they come. (With one exception, Toomey was a full-spectrum consistent conservative, particularly considering he represented a swing state.) Lots of folks adopted the Tea Party as an identity to get elected; Toomey was for controlling spending long before it was popular and long after everyone abandoned it. Toomey doesn't have a bad relationship with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell or other GOP Senate leadership, but he doesn't always agree with them, either. He's wonky, cerebral, serious, and data-driven in a political era that doesn't reward any of those traits. Much has been made of the Republican's troubles in the suburbs in recent years. Back in 2016, Toomey carried Bucks County, 52 percent to 46.5 percent. His buttoned down, calm, even-keeled style reassured the soccer moms and white-collar commuters.
8. The trio of Jay W. Richards, Williams M. Briggs, and Douglas Axe find that the lockdowns had an effect that may be best described as bupkus. From the analysis:
How long? New infections should drop on day one and be noticed about ten or eleven days from the beginning of the lockdown. By day six, the number of people with first symptoms of infection should plummet (six days is the average time for symptoms to appear). By day nine or ten, far fewer people would be heading to doctors with worsening symptoms. If COVID-19 tests were performed right away, we would expect the positives to drop clearly on day ten or eleven (assuming quick turnarounds on tests).
To judge from the evidence, the answer is clear: Mandated lockdowns had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus. The charts below show the daily case curves for the United States as a whole and for thirteen U.S. states. As in almost every country, we consistently see a steep climb as the virus spreads, followed by a transition (marked by the gray circles) to a flatter curve. At some point, the curves always slope downward, though this wasn't obvious for all states until the summer.
The lockdowns can't be the cause of these transitions. In the first place, the transition happened even in places without lockdown orders (see Iowa and Arkansas). And where there were lockdowns, the transitions tended to occur well before the lockdowns could have had any serious effect. The only possible exceptions are California, which on March 19 became the first state to officially lock down, and Connecticut, which followed four days later.
9. Trey Traynor finds there will likely be unintended consequences that will catch short vote-by-mail advocates. From the piece:
Make no mistake, if the 2020 election continues beyond Election Day into litigation to determine a winner, the primary focus of all the parties will initially be the elimination of mail-in ballots that do not meet the numerous statutory requirements to be counted. Mail-in ballots are the low-hanging fruit in an election contest and the easiest way to put the true outcome of an election in question and thereby allow the courts to determine the winner. This situation is easily remedied by Americans simply showing up at the polls and voting in person.
Real-life examples from congressional primaries in the past few months forecast the many failings of mail-in voting. Note that mail-in voting is different from legitimate absentee and military/overseas voting, although recent reports show that even those votes are subject to mistreatment and potential loss.
On the surface, "vote-by-mail" sounds like a quick and easy way for every registered voter to participate in our democracy. In reality, it opens the U.S. to fraudulent elections on a massive scale that will probably result in invalid results, contested elections, and delays lasting weeks, if not months.
For example, New York State's congressional primary was held on June 23. One congressional district did not have an official winner until August 4, and several competitive races took almost a month to finally settle. The delay in results is entirely the result of mail-in ballots. Similar problems have occurred this year in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maryland, and Georgia. Nationally, more than 500,000 mail ballots were rejected during this year's primary season alone.
10. Court-packing, argues Charles C.W. Cooke, is a form of tyranny. From the commentary:
It is almost impossible to convey in words the monstrous enormity of what is being proposed, and yet it cannot be the case that our journalists lack the vocabulary with which to discuss it. For four years now, almost everything that President Trump has said and done has been met with language of the utmost urgency. We have heard about "shredded norms" and "threats to democracy" and "creeping fascism." We have been warned that we are flirting with "totalitarianism" and "dictatorship" and even "concentration camps." We have heard comparisons to Reichstag fires and the "secret police." We have been told "This is not normal." We have been informed that political parties that "ignore the law" are to be shunned. We have been regaled with lurid accounts of how nations decline. Often, this has been deserved, and, even when it has not, it has been justified on the grounds that free people remain free by acting prophylactically against encroachments. Now that it is the Democratic Party doing the threatening, however, the prose has become tentative, prosaic, and dull. Has there been a national recall on thesauruses?
Equally unlikely is that the lack of interest is the product of a lack of concern for the courts, for, when President Trump has criticized judicial decisions — or, worse, individual judges — he has been rightly lambasted. In a typical piece in The Atlantic, Garrett Epps described Trump's verbal attacks as part of a "sordid war," lamented that "the independent judiciary hasn't faced such a direct attack since the Jeffersonians," warned readers that we're headed toward "mortally dangerous constitutional territory," encouraged Americans to fall into "uproar," and asked whether Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch would see fit to stand up against Trump's rhetoric. If not, Epps inquired, "who will speak up for them when their time comes?"
One might now ask the same question of The Atlantic, which has started running pieces in favor of Court-packing, and of everyone else who has refused to engage. If, as Epps proposes, it was crucially important that John Roberts denounce Trump's rhetorical provocations, surely it is utterly critical that the media and the legal profession assail the Democrats' concrete threat until it is no more? We now have a series of prominent political figures who are not merely criticizing the Supreme Court but promising to destroy it, along with a presidential candidate who refuses to say whether he is on board — and still the matter is covered as if it were a minor dispute. Why? There is no honest calculation by which it can be more alarming for a president to rail impotently about judicial decisions than for the core of a political party to threaten to destroy the entire settlement.
11. More Court Packing, More Harsanyi: David argues the Democrat scheme — which has deep roots in the party's progressive DNA — will destroy the judiciary. From the article:
Today, every instance in which Democrats are denied a political victory is immediately transformed into a national "crisis" in which the public has "lost faith" in a system that worked perfectly fine when they were in power. Not that long ago, self-interest was a motivation for defending deliberative politics and republican order. But these days, undeterred by reality, partisans have convinced themselves they'll be in power forever.
It's not merely the progressive fringe that demands Democrats blow up the courts. It is the partisan, self-proclaimed defenders of "norms." In a recent piece in The Atlantic, the nation's leading periodical of intellectual anti-constitutionalism, Lawfare's Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey argue that "if Republicans continue the smash-and-grab approach to confirming Barrett," court-packing "may be the only way for Democrats to save the Court."
The duly elected president and the duly elected Senate are observing the constitutionally stipulated guidelines for placing a highly qualified jurist on the Court. Someone will need to do a better job of explaining how dismantling the Court will "save" it. Now, perhaps if you've lost the ability to differentiate between ends and means, the idea makes intuitive sense to you. Perhaps you nod along as Biden spuriously argues that Amy Coney Barrett's nomination is nothing more than the exploitation of a "loophole" to undo the Affordable Care Act, ignoring the fact that we don't know how she'll rule on the Obamacare lawsuit (and the fact that either way, Obamacare isn't some untouchable edict handed down from Mount Sinai). But back here in the real world, we know that court-packing would be far more destructive to our political order than anything Donald Trump has done, Barrett's nomination very much included.
12. California is a place of embers, but, as Victor Davis Hanson writes, its governor is focusing on . . . reparations. From the column:
When fires raged, killed dozens, polluted the air for months, consumed thousands of structures, and scorched 4 million acres of forest, the governor reacted by thundering about global warming. But Newsom was mostly mute about state and federal green polices that discouraged the removal of millions of dead and drought-stricken trees, which provided the kindling for the infernos.
When gasoline, sales, and income taxes rose, and yet state schools became even worse, infrastructure remained decrepit, and deficits grew, California demanded that federal COVID-19 money bail out its own financial mismanagement.
In a time of pandemic, mass quarantine, self-induced recession, riot, arson, and looting, the California way is to borrow money to spend on something that will not address why residents can't find a job, can't rely on their power grid, can't drive safely, can't breathe the air, can't ensure a high-quality education for their children, and can't walk the streets of the state's major cities without fear of being assaulted or stepping in excrement.
So it is a poor time to discuss reparations, even if there were good reasons to borrow to pay out such compensation. But in fact there are none.
13. Woke staffers at the Guggenheim Museum, reports Brian Allen, has gone batty. From the report:
"A Better Guggenheim" describes itself as a "collective of Guggenheim staff, past and present." It's got a website and an Instagram account, publishes a newsletter, offers job guidance, and, more to the point, demands that the trustees of the museum fire the museum's director, chief curator, and chief operating officer.
Richard Armstrong, the director, "nurtures a culture of racism, sexism, and classism" at all the Guggenheim branches, the collective tells us. He has endorsed a work environment that's "fundamentally unsafe" to employees. He has breached the museum's and the Art Museum Directors Association's code of ethics. He's "atavistic." Fred Flintstone, they're coming after you next. Lucky for Tarzan, he's not a museum director.
Armstrong said two exhibitions about Hispanic women artists had "a lot of Latina flair," suggesting he believes that too much of a good thing is, well, too much. He prioritized new bookcases for his office while the lowest-paid curatorial staff worked in cubicles. That's classist, I guess. That's life, too, kids. Suck it up, he's the director.
The collective is "dismayed by the Guggenheim's failure to affirm the most basic fact: Black Lives Matter." This statement is linked to BLM's website, which continues to be cleansed of its most extreme positions, such as support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement, abolishing police departments, limitless immigration, racial quotas, and a socialist economy.
14. Cameron Hilditch contemplates J.R.R. Tolkien, sorta-anarchist. From the Corner post:
According to Tolkien, the main malady afflicting political language is euphemism. Orwell made a similar point in "Politics and The English Language," but he didn't fasten onto the issue of names the way Tolkien does. "Government" is nothing more or less than a huge apparatus built to threaten and inflict violence upon people within a given locality. In democracies, we elect the people who threaten and inflict this violence upon us, but it's still violence all the same. Tolkien is making the point that our thinking about politics would be a lot clearer if it reflected this fact; that government is, at bottom, a process whereby certain individuals wield coercive power over others.
Euphemisms such as "the state," "the government," "public spending," and "public services" mask this fact by drawing a veil of impersonal and lofty neutrality over the state that obscures what it actually does. That's why getting "back to personal names" is so important. If, instead of saying "I'm filing my tax returns," Americans were in the habit of saying "I'm forfeiting my property to Donald, Nancy, and Mitch at gunpoint," we might start to think about taxation, and government in general, a lot differently.
15. The stakes are high, says Rich Lowry, so is it too much to ask President Trump to rise to the seriousness of the challenge? From the column:
The warnings from the right about the potentially existential stakes of 2020 often inveigh against Republican pundits critical of Trump yet never get around to urging any correction on the president's part. Indeed, even as Trump, too, talks in dire tones about the consequences of a Biden victory, he doesn't seem to have absorbed the message.
If the existence of the country itself is on the ballot, why not prepare better for debates? Why not use Twitter exclusively for messages that advance his cause rather than detract from them? Why waste any time on petty animosities and distractions? Why not write down a health-care plan and a COVID-19 plan to blunt Biden's most potent issues?
Why not, in short, do a few things that are uncomfortable or unnatural in the cause of, you know, saving the country from imminent political destruction?
Of course, by this point, even asking these questions seems naive, although there were times in 2016 when Trump modulated his behavior enough to make a difference.
16. The headline of the analysis by Ed Haislmaier and John Goodman says it all — "Public Option Health Plans Haven't Lowered Premiums." From the article:
As these examples show, when competing on a level playing field, public option insurers offer little or no savings relative to private insurers. For a public option insurer to enjoy a significant price advantage the government would need to rig the market in its favor not only by requiring doctors and hospitals to participate, but also by forcing them to accept lower fees than those charged to its competitors. Indeed, such provisions are included in the public option bills sponsored by congressional liberals.
Yet all the benefits of competition begin to vanish if government tilts the scales in favor of one rival over another.
Some lawmakers tried to make a public option part of the original Affordable Care Act. Although they failed in that effort, they succeeded in including something similar: non-profit co-operative health plans with boards that did not include representatives from the conventional health-insurance industry.
The experience of the co-ops has been one failure after another, even though they initially received generous government subsidies not available to their competitors. Of the 23 co-op plans created under Obamacare, only four still survive — a 79 percent failure rate.
17. This Missive’s Author penned a piece on The Corner, recommending a most-worthwhile video/podcast from the Napa Institute featuring the great Hong Kong dissident, Jimmy Lai. Find the links here.
Capital Matters
1. Because we need to be retaught this time and again, Christos Makridis says that regulations are the enemy of the middle class and job-creation From the article:
Using data spanning every occupation over time, we show that a 10 percent rise in regulatory restrictions is associated with a 5.3 percent rise in STEM employment. Increases in regulatory restrictions are also associated with declines in lower- and middle-skilled jobs. That's important, given that non-STEM jobs have historically served an important role for the middle class, creating opportunities for upward mobility and family stability. This marks one of the important unintended consequences of greater regulation.
Unlike prior studies that have sought to quantify the effects of regulation, our analysis uniquely isolates the responsiveness of STEM employment, relative to its non-STEM counterparts, to changes in regulation within the same sub-sector over time. This helps avoid concerns about spurious factors like overall changes in technology or a growing demand for the digital workforce.
What explains the link between regulation and STEM employment? Not surprisingly, we show that increases in regulation are associated with greater compliance costs. In this sense, the data suggest that firms, especially in financial services, hire STEM workers at least in part to automate more of their organizational activities, which reduces the scope for human error and raises the overall value of the business. In fact, according to some estimates, the market for regulatory technology (or "RegTech") is expected to grow from $4.3 billion in 2018 to $12.3 billion by 2023.
In sum, the surge in regulation accelerated the shift toward STEM employment in financial services, adversely impacting many lower- and middle-skilled workers who traditionally relied on these jobs.
2. Mike Watson warns that electric vehicles will drive America's manufacturing economy off the road. From the beginning of the piece:
Electric cars are quickly attaining a status in American culture previously reserved for mothers, Marvel movies, and apple pie: Everyone likes them. As the first presidential debate showed, Donald Trump and Joe Biden agree on hardly anything, but they set aside partisanship when it comes to electric vehicles. Tesla's stock has skyrocketed 400 percent this year, and Wall Street is showering even obscure brands with money. But danger lurks beneath the glowing headlines. China's industrial policy prioritizes electric autos, and many Americans fear that the United States will lose out in this sector.
Securing America's Future Energy (SAFE) just released their plan, titled "The Commanding Heights of Global Transportation," to regain the lead. The authors of the plan, which was signed by former Pacific Command chief Admiral Dennis Blair, lay out a comprehensive roadmap for winning the competition with China over our energy future by subsidizing electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, 5G internet and rare earth minerals. In doing so, they illustrate exactly how hard industrial policy will be going forward.
Their primary objective is to preserve the American automotive and truck-manufacturing industry. This is a worthy goal: Although fond reminiscences of old Chevys and Fords can lead discussions about the auto industry into unenlightening nostalgia fests, auto production is important for the United States. Millions of Americans owe their jobs to car manufacturing, which contributed over $500 billion to GDP last year.
3. Daniel Tenreiro explains why the Coronavirus-Relief legislation talks collapsed on Capitol Hill. From the piece:
So why would Republicans refuse the deal? It all comes down to the main sticking point: federal assistance to states and cities. Pelosi's bill provides $500 billion in state and local funding and an additional $225 billion to public-school systems — more than double what Republicans are willing to agree to. And as with previous rounds of negotiations, Democrats have attempted to avail themselves of the recession to eliminate the cap on state and local tax deductions included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. National Review's Kevin Hassett, the former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, estimates that the amount of assistance in the bill totals five times the revenue lost by states and localities from the COVID recession.
Cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago are starting to feel the squeeze. New York's bonds just received a downgrade from credit-rating agency Moody's, even after the city cut $1 billion from the police department. California is facing a deficit as high as $54 billion, in addition to the seemingly insurmountable holes in its public-pension system — all while growing numbers of residents leave for low-tax states such as Texas and Arizona. Whereas tax hikes might have been feasible in the days of unlimited SALT deductions, they would now have the effect of accelerating the exodus from coastal cities.
It's a nightmare scenario for Democratic governors long cleared of fiscal responsibility by the SALT deduction, mortgage deductions, and a handful of other backdoor subsidies to high-income states.
4. Charles Bowyer and Jerry Bowyer argue that Netflix's production of Cuties merits shareholder activism. From the article:
Leaving aside for a moment the immorality of featuring this film — particularly in the way it was marketed — it was clearly a bad decision on Netflix's part purely from a business perspective. According to data research company YipitData, Netflix saw a dramatic spike in cancellations after the story broke. Over the course of September, when the controversy over Cuties was particularly fervent, Netflix underperformed the NASDAQ technology sector, dropping by 5.6 percent compared with -3.7 percent for the NDXT.
As for how it happened, given that these decisions are likely made internally within Netflix's marketing department, it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure, but it does illustrate the necessity of viewpoint diversity at big-tech firms. Would Netflix have designed a marketing campaign in this way if there were, say, some conservative Christians involved in the decision-making process? The lack of any programs to promote diversity of viewpoint at Netflix, or big tech generally, is at least partially to blame here. The reaction to this film has largely been one of outrage and disgust across the political spectrum, so care should be taken not to uniformly blame "the Left" for Netflix's marketing of Cuties. But the campaign was using a political angle, by casting the child dance crew as a release from conservative family traditions. To be clear, the "conservative family traditions" in the film are those of traditional Islam, such as polygamy, but Netflix opted to use vague and politically charged language that conjured up orthodox religious values in general. Evidently, some employees at Netflix thought they could increase user engagement by portraying the sexual exploitation of minors as simply another bold act of defiance against conservative traditions as a whole. It is a reasonable assumption that a conservative marketer would not have gone down the road Netflix's current team did.
Lights. Camera. Review!
1. Kyle Smith finds Red, White and Blue "biographically inaccurate and unsatisfying as drama." From the review:
In effect, Red, White and Blue, which is based on a true story, is a remake of Serpico with race rather than corruption creating the dividing line between one idealistic cop and all the others. As Al Pacino's Frank Serpico did in the Seventies, Boyega's Leroy finds groups of chattering cops falling silent when he walks into the room, gets left nasty anonymous messages, and learns that the loneliest of men is a cop who calls for backup but finds none forthcoming. McQueen paints a vivid portrait likely to resonate widely in this season of anger with the police, but, as with Mangrove, the film is more of a polemic than a story. At an hour and 20 minutes, it seems to end before its third act. As it is, Red, White and Blue merely reaffirms a depressing reality: When an entire system is sick, no single individual, no matter how brave or well-intentioned, is likely to be able to make much of a difference. Casually racist remarks in break rooms, supervisors who urge Leroy to think of the community he supposedly serves as "a jungle," and unnecessarily harsh treatment of suspects clarify what Leroy is up against. As we've seen in many previous honest-cop movies, the hero must choose a side: Either try to police the police or learn not to raise a fuss at departmental misconduct. If you do the former, you won't last long as a cop. Moreover, you're putting your life in danger.
2. Armond White watches Antebellum and finds the screen filled with race-hustling. Oh yeah: He drops the hammer on Janelle Monae. From the review:
Monae told a Variety podcast, "I didn't know if this film [Antebellum] was life imitating art or art imitating life," adding the usual prattle about "white supremists [sic]" and "systematic oppression." Her facile political stances are as superficial as her cosmetic ruses and cartoonish costumes. She sings and dances in that narrow space between hip and histrionic — on the verge of moral schizophrenia. That's the state of mind belonging to race hustlers who stave off the guilt of their success. They feel entitled to it, telling themselves it is for the good of the race, then demanding that the white world bow down to them. And guilt-ridden whites, in both the craven music industry and Hollywood, comply with the neo-blackmail.
Monae's persecution complex directs everything she does and has ruined her showbiz potential. (She was almost inspiring in Hidden Figures.) It could be a generational thing, or it could also just be an affectation. But the proliferation of rotten movies like Antebellum tells us this repugnant self-righteous pop movement isn't over yet.
Consider: Janelle Monae is not Josephine Baker, the legendary Negro performer who left behind American prejudice to become the toast of European exoticism — the Beyoncé of the Roaring Twenties. Monae epitomizes dime-a-dozen Black Lives Matter types like that program's sexually disgruntled black female founders whose acrimony is based in deep-seated bitterness, an angry response to not-belonging. Baker made her way out of an enervating world into a different one, but Monae represents a new brand of race celebrity who, no matter how much acclaim and acceptance come her way, operates from a stance of resentment (unlike Kanye West's singular mode of imaginative defiance).
3. More Armond: He finds in the rubble of David Byrne's American Utopia a ruined pop icon. It's the price of collaborating with Spike Lee. From the beginning of the review:
David Byrne's American Utopia repudiates the beloved Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. In that 1984 release, director Jonathan Demme pared down the preppy New Wave group's dance pop to its aural and visual art-rock essentials, revealing the discrete elements that make up pop music and heterogeneous American culture. Band leader David Byrne was able to combine his intellectual humor and his fascination for funk tribalism with Demme's humanist worldview. Demme's self-effacing cinematic sophistication transcended the sociological embarrassment about white funk that American Utopia puts full frontal.
The repudiation that occurs here owes to the white guilt and shame that has overtaken Millennial liberals — to the point that Byrne has rethought his past cultural globalism. Borrowing beats and rhythms from international cultures make the American Utopia project (album, Broadway show, and, finally, film) a post-Trump oddity. Although the president, formerly a hip-hop icon, goes unmentioned, American Utopia nevertheless responds to the fact that his 2016 election rattled liberal confidence — Byrne explicitly apologizes to Black Lives Matter during the film's climactic musical number.
This qualifies as self-repudiation because for the first time in Byrne's career, he stoops to make blatant political commentary in his art. The opening overhead shot of a starkly decorated stage with a desk and a chain-link curtain demarcates the performance space for an ensemble of diverse prancing musicians. All barefoot, dressed in unisex pantsuits like Byrne himself, the self-abnegating gray motif serves to blend — and not offend — racial and sexual difference. The minimalist décor in Stop Making Sense was stripped down, this is stripping away.
Elsewhere in the Conservative Solar System
1. At Quillette, Samuel Kronen reflects on Shelby Steele and his prescience. From the piece:
In Steele's view, the explanation of black underachievement has its origins in the moral fall from grace of the 1960s when racism was first stigmatized out of polite society. For the first time, a critical mass of whites became conscious of their historic privilege and complicity in racism in ways that transformed the larger culture, while a critical mass of blacks came to identify with their historic victimization. It can be difficult for modern sensibilities to appreciate just how new this development was at the time. It started a perpetual motion machine of white guilt and black power politics that set the terms of America's implicit racial contract. Ever since, both whites and blacks have developed unconscious patterns to guard their sense of racial innocence. A significant strand of white American culture projects a sense of guilt about the plight of blacks to dissociate themselves from the stigma of racism, and a significant strand of black American culture compels an angry militant pose to win concessions from white society and dissociate from the stigma of inferiority. White guilt is black power; they are the same phenomenon.
Steele argued that this mutual need to feel innocent of history keeps Americans stuck in the past and prevents race relations from making real progress. The guilt-complex of many whites prevents a frank conversation about issues afflicting segments of the black community, reflexively blaming racism for everything from homicide rates to fatherless homes to academic achievement gaps. Meanwhile, Affirmative Action and other diversity programs are introduced, not to help their ostensible beneficiaries, but to dissociate institutions from the stigma of racism. It's about innocence, not uplift. On the other hand, the victim-complex of many blacks encourages them to keep whites "on the hook" for racism and ultimately mitigates the need for personal responsibility or cultural change. If racism is everywhere, always, what's the point of trying? It's an excuse for failure. The upshot is that both groups have a vested interest in the continuing existence of racism to justify their own moral identities. This helps explain the fanatical obsession with elevating any incident or event that carries the whiff of racism into the national spotlight.
To move beyond this racial impasse in our culture, Steele contends, race must be rejected as a means to innocence and power. Indeed, the whole effort of the civil rights movement was to reject identity as a means to power. What passes for anti-racism today accepts the basic premises of white supremacy by injecting melanin with moral meaning. What we need, according to Steele, is a revitalization of individualism in our society — an emphasis on black autonomy as against the historical determinism of the cultural Left, and an American humanism that appreciates our common bonds as citizens over racial and ethnic differences. This means discarding all forms of race essentialism and separatism.
2. At Law and Liberty, Daniel J. Mahoney and Richard Reinsch discuss the new Liberty and Justice for All" project. Listen to the podcast here. From the From the transcript:
Well, they did overshoot because they engaged in what the political theorist, Gerhart Niemeyer once called a total critique of the West and a total critique of America. And total critiques are always tied to totalitarianism because total critiques, demand negation and destruction. So they did overshoot and people have begun to notice. Now, I don't for a second believe Nikole Hannah-Jones and the ideologues as the participants in the grievance industry around her have changed their minds at all. It's just that they are worried that their project will be less the source of a new orthodoxy if the more egregious ideological claims remain. But look, when Charles Kesler early on during this revolution published a piece in the New York Post called "The 1619 Riots," Nikole Hannah-Jones, tweeted that she was proud of that. In other words, this is the same woman who said when we destroy property we're not committing violence.
We know the amount of property damage and the violence that accompanies that, it is a form of violence but other even more incendiary forms of violence accompany it. They are stepping back a bit I mean again, the trained Marxists, the ideologues who inspired and lead BLM are still trained Marxists, are still committed to the deconstruction of the family, still hate capitalism, still believe in an ideological Manichaenism where blacks and LGBTQ people are all innocent by definition and forever, and where whites and others I suppose Jews are forever guilty. So nothing has changed. But I think after four months of audacity, violence, mayhem, and the utter silence of the political class and of the Democratic party, a good part of the country is waking up. You could see it in the declining support down from 66 to 44%, I think for BLM, people are now making distinctions we made four months ago between an affirmation that all black lives matter and all lives matter, and the claims of the BLM movement.
So I think we're in a better place now, even than when I wrote my "Culture of Hate" piece in July or late July I felt very alone and I really was stunned by the whole silence of the conservative political class, even more so the Republican party. And I think people are beginning to see, and they're beginning to see in part, because the idealogues push so hard so quickly, so boldly, so nihilistically that it's almost impossible not to see despite the censorship by the mainstream media. You know, if you just watch MSNBC and CNN, you would not know that our city was on fire. You simply wouldn't know.
3. At The Spectator USA, our dear friend David Pryce-Jones pens a gorgeous reflection on his once-home, as war approached: Royaumont. From the piece:
A year or so ago, I went back to Royaumont, together with Helena Bonham Carter, the actress and the daughter of my first cousin Elena. A film company had selected Helena among others to make the point that their grandparents had lived in more dangerous times than they did. I was part of the family wartime story of escape that Helena was about to tell. The sun was shining when we arrived, and it seemed improbable that I could ever have lived in this grandiose and genial setting.
The Phony War lasted for the first five months of 1940. Nothing was happening: perhaps tomorrow there'd be no war. My father, already in the British intelligence services, had to attend a course at Cambridge, and my mother wanted to be with him. She had been brought up by a nanny who had stayed on at Royaumont. Born in 1872 in the village of Horspath, now virtually incorporated into Oxford, Jessie Wheeler had been my mother's nanny and took charge of the four-year-old me. She had much the same determined look as Queen Victoria in old age, and her opinions were the same as Churchill's.
Also in the house were its owner, my uncle Max, his and my mother's elder sister Helene, and Helene's husband Eduardo Propper de Callejón, a secretary at the Spanish embassy in Paris. Their two children, Philip and Elena, were a little older than me.
In the middle of the night, Max arrived with dramatic news. As I describe in my autobiography Fault Lines, we had to leave. There was no time to lose, the Germans had broken through and would soon be here. The government had fled from Paris to Bordeaux. In a car flying the Spanish flag, we joined what came to be known as the 'great exodus', as most of the population from the north of France took to the roads in cars, on bicycles, even on foot carrying suitcases. For a while afterwards, mothers were advertising for their child that had gone missing. The nation had collapsed. Quite why the French proved unwilling to fight is still unclear, but the shame of it conditions the national psyche.
Helena hardly knew her grandfather Eduardo. It was strange — to say the least — to be sitting drinking coffee in one of the downstairs rooms of the Palais in order to analyze what sort of a man he must have been, just as we might have done if there had been no war and we were only gossiping.
4. At The Wall Street Journal, William McGurn was right about underestimating Veep Mike Pence. From the column:
Our opinion-shaping class appears to expect that Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, will wipe the floor with the mild-mannered vice president. Don't bet on it. Yes, in the first Democratic primary debate Ms. Harris put Mr. Biden on the ropes. But she never matched that dominating performance in subsequent debates, and she had a hard time answering questions when Mr. Biden started firing back. After an explosive start, she flamed out and withdrew from the race before a single vote had been cast.
Unlike Ms. Harris, Mr. Pence's advantages are all the understated ones. And unlike Mr. Trump, the words most often used to describe the vice president are "calm" and "measured." Those who have watched him know his aw-shucks Midwestern demeanor serves him well in debates.
This is how Mr. Pence prevailed the last time he was on the debate stage. In 2016 Hillary Clinton's veep pick, Sen. Tim Kaine, took more or less the same approach Mr. Trump took last week, badgering and interrupting Mr. Pence to try to make him answer for Mr. Trump's more provocative comments. It didn't work. Even the New York Times conceded in a headline that "Commentators Give Edge to Mike Pence."
What one observer called Mr. Kaine's "over-caffeinated" style, the Times article suggested, had backfired against Mr. Pence's Hoosier imperturbability: "Commentators and critics said Mr. Pence successfully played defense for 90 minutes, dodging, denying and ultimately appearing more stately as he handled an unenviable challenge with remarkable steadiness."
5. At The College Fix, our old paisan, Christopher Tremoglie, explores the hypocrisy of law school profs when it comes to Amy Barrett. From the beginning of the article:
When Mitch McConnell stonewalled President Obama's Supreme Court nominee four years ago, 350 law professors signed a letter urging the Senate majority leader to give Merrick Garland a "prompt and fair hearing and a timely vote." The Senate was failing its "constitutional duty" otherwise.
Now that President Trump has nominated another jurist for the high court in an election year, how many of those law professors will publicly stick by their analysis with a Republican administration?
Four, it turns out.
The College Fix reached out to all 350 professors from Sept. 23 through Oct. 1 to ask if they would similarly call on the Senate to hold a hearing and vote on Amy Coney Barrett, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge. Thirty-six responded, with the vast majority giving similar explanations of why Barrett doesn't deserve the same treatment they sought for Garland.
6. At Gatestone Institute, Lawrence Franklin makes note of Red China's latest efforts at "assimilation" of oppressed minority populations. From the beginning of the piece:
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping doubled down on his professed policy of ethnic assimilation on September 26 at a two-day party conference on Xinjiang.
In reality, the CCP policy in Xinjiang of "assimilation" resembles more the forced unity of cultural genocide. There is ample evidence that these same repressive policies are being applied in several other Chinese territories where ethnic minorities are prominent. Similar "assimilation" programs presently are being implemented in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China's northeastern province of Jilin.
These "assimilation" projects were kept under wraps until they were abruptly revealed upon the opening of the new school year on September 1. The principal feature of the "assimilation" program in ethnic areas is the eradication of native languages as a medium of instruction. All courses in minority regions are now taught in Mandarin, the principal language of Han Chinese who comprise about 92% of the population.
Inner Mongolia, about twice the size of California and home to approximately 4 million Mongols, exploded into unrest when parents discovered that their children would no longer be taught in their native tongue. Parents forcibly entered schools to remove their children. Protests engulfed the regional capital, Hothot, with about 300,000 students boycotting classes; some of the students joined the demonstrations and security forces arrested thousands of protestors. The Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRISC), a New York-based Mongol human rights organization claimed that nine teachers and students committed suicide to protest the new regulations. Many students fled into the remote plains and mountains and were pursued by security search teams. Students who were caught have been separated from parental care. Many supporters of the boycott were fired from their jobs.
7. At the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Jay Schalin recounts the activities of cancel culture warriors targeting Portland State University's Bruce Gilley. From the piece:
One such situation is occurring at Portland State University in Oregon. The political science department has rewritten its by-laws to distance itself from professor Bruce Gilley. Among the changes is the creation of a process for making statements of condemnation against department members whose work offends a consensus of the department.
Gilley, who is tenured, is no stranger to controversial research. In 2017, he published an article titled "The Case for Colonialism," in which he suggested that European colonies in the Third World were both beneficial and legitimate, as they generally increased the local standard of living and were often supported by a significant portion of the local population.
Obviously, such a hypothesis goes against the academic zeitgeist; it was considered deeply offensive and decried throughout academia and elsewhere. The editor of the journal that published it, Third World Quarterly, even resigned his position out of fear for his physical safety.
However, Gilley was neither cowed nor chastened by the criticism and threats directed at him. He has continued to write articles questioning the accepted orthodoxy in his field — and has added activities such as defending free expression on campus, calling for the reform of university governance, and speaking out on matters of public policy. As can be expected, these pursuits are not ingratiating him on campus and off any more than his 2017 article did.
But the question of whether an author is deserving of academic freedom does not rest on whether people like the idea expressed; unpopular opinions are an important reason why free speech and academic freedom protections exist in the first place. Rather, academic freedom is afforded to scholars because their work meets standards of rationality and method. Or, in some cases, it may be denied because their claims are unnecessarily venal.
Baseballery
Many a pitcher has had a great a season, but who was the best in that legendary Year of the Pitcher, 1968. In the NL, the Giants Juan Marichal, may have had more wins (26), and in the AL, Detroit's Denny McLain thrilled the baseball world with his 31 victories (accompanied by a 1.96 ERA), but most would regard the king of the mound that year to have been the great Bob Gibson, the ferocious and competitive righthander who passed away this September.
Truth be told, 1968 did not begin all that smoothly for the future Hall of Famer. Gibson didn't earn his first win until the end of April, and a month later, despite a devastating 1.52 ERA, his record stood at 3-5. Then came an amazing tear: Gibson won his next 12 starts, each of them a complete game, 8 of them shut-outs. Only 6 earned runs were allowed during the stretch. Come July 30, his record had ballooned to 15-5, and his ERA fell to a microscopic 0.96. When the season ended, his record was 22-9, with a 1.12 ERA. In September, he picked up 3 losses — all of them one-run decisions (including a 1-0 loss to the Giants on September 17th, a no-hitter dealt the Cards courtesy of Gaylord Perry).
That year Gibson would earn the first of two Cy Young Awards. But there was a low pointamidst the glory, and it came on the season's last day, when Gibson, the MVP of the 1964 and 1967 World Series, and contending for a third, with two brilliant wins already in the 1968 Series against the Tigers. But the Baseball Gods frowned that day: He was the losing pitcher in Game 7, as Mickey Lolich picked up his third victory and a championship for Detroit.
Back to the regular season: In his June run, Gibson pitched five consecutive shutouts. But for a few inches, there could have been a sixth: On Monday, July 1, in a night game at Dodger Stadium, in which the Cardinals prevailed, 5-1, the only run that Los Angeles scored was courtesy of a Gibson wild pitch.
On the mound that night for the Dodgers was another Hall of Fame hurler who helped 1968 earn its special distinction for pitchers: Don Drysdale. The intimidating and towering righthander set a MLB record that spring with six consecutive shutouts, starting with a 1-0 squeaker on May 14 at home over the Cubs, and ending on Tuesday, June 4th, again at home, when he three-hit the Pirates in a 5-0 victory (one of the shutouts came against Gibson and the Cardinals on May 22nd).
It's worth noting that Gibson's second Cy Young was earned in 1970, when he led the NL with a 23-7 record (and a 3.12 ERA). Not too shabby (as pitchers go) handling a bat (Gibson was a lifetime .206 hitter), that year he hit an impressive .303. He also won yet another Golden Glove (Gibson earned nine over his career).
By the way, Drysdale could hit too: He smacked 29 home runs over 14 years.
We pray they are both together, in a happier place, a field of dreams, having a catch then resting in peace.
A Dios
A loyal reader of this weekly undertaking contacted the Author to admonish him. Why? For not seeking prayers for POTUS and FLOTUS and all others who work at or visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and picked up COVID. Well, maybe not admonish. But there was a healthy dose of (deserved?) disappointment delivered, despite an explanation: It was a timing thing. It was. Alas, the mustard was not cut. Penitent, let us end this week's missive with a heartfelt request for their continued recovery.
Would that The Almighty Bestow on You and Yours Penetrating Graces,
Jack Fowler, who will accept admonishments on all sorts of matters if emailed to jfowler@nationalreview.com.
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